I'm pretty sure anyone in the industry that draws this distinction between cattle and pets has never worked with cattle and only knows of general ideas about the industrial cattle business.
Google tells me beef cattle are slaughtered after 2 years. Split 2 years among 44,000 cattle and you get to spend at most 24 minutes with each one, if you dedicate 2 years of your life to nothing else but that, not even sleep, travel, eating. If you let them live their natural life expectancy of 20 years, you get 240 minutes with each cow - two hours in its 20 year life.
"I care about my cattle", yes, I don't think "cattle" is supposed to mean "stop caring about the things you work on". "I know each and every one as well as the family dog I've had for ten years", no. That's not possible. You raise them industrially and kill them for profit/food, that's a different dynamic than with Spot.
I believe this is just a great example of why cattle shouldn't be raised in such high volume industrial processes.
Have you ever been around cattle? Or helped them calve? Or slaughtered one for meat?
I know every one of my animals and understand the herd dynamics, from who the lead cow is to who is the asshole that is the one often starting fights and annoying the others.
We shouldn't be throwing so many animals into such a controlled and confined system that they are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. We shouldn't raise an animal for slaughter after dedicating at most 24 minutes to them.
"cattle not pets" is about computer servers, it's not about ethical treatment of living creatures. Whether or not living animals should be numbers on a spreadsheet, servers can be without ethical concerns[1]. "I treat my cattle like pets" is respectable, but not relevant - unless you are also saying "therefore you should treat your servers like pets", which you would need to expand on.
> "I know every one of my animals"
And you are still dodging the part where there is a point at which you could not do that if you had more and more animals. You can choose not to have more animals, but a company cannot avoid having more servers if they are to digitise more workflows, serve more customers, offer more complex services, have higher reliability failovers, DR systems, test systems, developer systems, monitoring and reporting and logging and analysis of all of the above - and again the analogy is not saying "the way companies treat cows is the right way to treat cows", it's saying "the ruthless, ROI-focused, commodity way companies actually do treat cows is a more scalable and profitable way to think about the computer servers/services that you currently think about like family pets".
[1] at least, first order ones in a pre-AI age. Energy use, pollution, habitat damage, etc. are another matter.
Ranchers do eat their pets. They generally do love the cattle, but they also know at the end of a few years they get replaced - it is the cycle of life.
